Is Your Favorite Influencer's Opinion Bought and Sold?

From Lee Fang, at the Los Angeles Times:

Your addictive doomscrolling on X, TikTok or Instagram may also be the latest nexus for millions of dollars in secret political corruption.

Over the last month, the problem has come into sharp relief. Newly surfaced documents show that more than 500 social media creators were part of a covert electioneering effort by Democratic donors to shape the presidential election in favor of Kamala Harris. Payments went to party members with online followings but also to non-political influencers — people known for comedy posts, travel vlogs or cooking YouTubes — in exchange for “positive, specific pro-Kamala content” meant to create the appearance of a groundswell of support for the former vice president.

Meanwhile, a similar pay-to-post effort among conservative influencers publicly unraveled. The goal was to publish messages in opposition to Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s push to remove sugary soda beverages from eligible SNAP food stamp benefits. Influencers were allegedly offered money to denounce soda restrictions as “an overreach that unfairly targets consumer choice” and encouraged to post pictures of President Trump enjoying Coca-Cola products. After right-leaning reporter Nick Sortor pointed out the near-identical messages on several prominent accounts, posts came down and at least one of the influencers apologized: “That was dumb of me. Massive egg on my face. In all seriousness, it won’t happen again.”

In both schemes, on the left and the right, those creating the content made little to no effort to disclose that payments could be involved. For ordinary users stumbling on the posts and videos, what they saw would have seemed entirely organic.

In the influencers’ defense, they didn’t break any rules — because none exist...

Sad-Posting on Tik-Tok

It's all bad for you, all of social media. 

These platforms seem to be getting worse, though. Either that, or more scrutiny is revealing how lethal they are.

At WSJ, "Self-harm, sad-posting and disordered-eating videos abound on the popular app":

Calls to ban TikTok in the U.S. are growing louder. Government leaders are trying to keep the popular China-owned social video platform away from schools, public workers, even entire states, on the grounds that users’ data could wind up in the wrong hands.

Data privacy, though, might be less worrisome than the power of TikTok’s algorithm. Especially if you’re a parent.

A recent study found that when researchers created accounts belonging to fictitious 13-year-olds, they were quickly inundated with videos about eating disorders, body image, self-harm and suicide.

If that sounds familiar, a Wall Street Journal investigation in 2021 found that TikTok steers viewers to dangerous content. TikTok has since strengthened parental controls and promised a more even-keeled algorithm, but the new study suggests the app experience for young teens has changed little.

What teens see on social media can negatively affect them psychologically. Plenty of research backs this up. The simplest evidence may be found in my earlier column about teens who developed physical tics after watching repeated TikTok videos of people exhibiting Tourette Syndrome-like behavior.

A TikTok spokeswoman said the company has a team of more than 40,000 people moderating content. In the last three months of 2022, TikTok said it removed about 85 million posts deemed in violation of its community guidelines, of which 2.8% were suicide, self-harm and eating-disorder content. It also considers the removal of content flagged by users. “We are open to feedback and scrutiny, and we seek to engage constructively with partners,” the spokeswoman added.

Two-thirds of U.S. teens use TikTok, and 16% of all U.S. teens say they’re on it near constantly, according to Pew Research Center. Kids’ frequent social-media use—along with the potential for algorithms to lure teens down dangerous rabbit holes—is a factor in the American Psychological Association’s new recommendations for adolescent social-media use.

The group this week said parents should monitor their younger kids’ social-media scrolling and keep watch for troublesome use. The APA also urges parents and tech companies to be extra vigilant about content that encourages kids to do themselves harm.

‘Every 39 seconds’ The Center for Countering Digital Hate, a nonprofit that works to stop the spread of online hate and disinformation, tested what teens see on TikTok. Last August, researchers set up eight TikTok accounts to look like they belonged to 13-year-olds in the U.S., the U.K., Canada and Australia. For 30 minutes, researchers behind the accounts paused briefly on any videos the platform’s For You page showed them about body image and mental health, and tapped the heart to like them.

TikTok almost immediately recommended videos about suicide and eating disorders, the researchers said. Videos about body image and mental health popped up on the accounts’ For You pages every 39 seconds, they added.

After the researchers published their findings, many of the videos they flagged disappeared from TikTok. Many of the accounts that posted the material remain. Those accounts include other videos that promote restrictive diets and discuss self-harm and suicide.

TikTok does take down content that clearly violates its guidelines by, for instance, referring directly to suicide. Videos where people describe their own suicidal feelings, however, might not be considered a violation—and wouldn’t fall under moderator scrutiny. They could even be helpful to some people. Yet child psychologists say these too can have a harmful effect.

TikTok executives have said the platform can be a place for sharing feelings about tough experiences, and cite experts who support the idea that actively coping with difficult emotions can be helpful for viewers and posters alike. They said TikTok aims to remove videos that promote or glorify self-harm while allowing educational or recovery content.

The company said it continually adjusts its algorithm to avoid repeatedly recommending a narrow range of content to viewers.

‘Sad and lonely’

The Center for Countering Digital Hate shared its full research with me, including links to 595 videos that TikTok recommended to the fake teen accounts. It also provided reels containing all of the videos, some of which are no longer on the site. I also looked at other content on the accounts with flagged videos.

After a few hours, I had to stop. If the rapid string of sad videos made me feel bad, how would a 14-year-old feel after watching this kind of content day after day?

One account is dedicated to “sad and lonely” music. Another features a teenage girl crying in every video, with statements about suicide. One is full of videos filmed in a hospital room. Each of the hospital videos contains text expressing suicidal thoughts, including, “For my final trick I shall turn into a disappointment.”

Users have developed creative ways to skirt TikTok’s content filters. For instance, since TikTok won’t allow content referencing suicide, people use a sound-alike such as “sewerslide,” or just write “attempt” and leave the rest to the viewer’s imagination. Creators of videos about disordered eating have also evaded TikTok’s filters...

Lisa Kennedy Montgomery on the Fall of MTV News

This is so right on. She's awesome.

Kennedy:

After 36 years, Paramount Media Networks President Chris McCarthy announced that the network will be shutting down @MTVNEWS. @KennedyNation reflects on her time with the network and provides insight at to why it is coming to a close. https://t.co/qjGnLKkqDp pic.twitter.com/xpnxuw7vXw

— FOX News Radio (@foxnewsradio) May 11, 2023

Uncool Blue Checks

Since anyone can get the blue check now, for $8.00, they're not that glamorous any more.

At the New York Times, "Are Blue Checks Uncool Now?":

Once a coveted status symbol, Twitter’s verification badge — which can be purchased for a monthly fee — is no longer fashionable, according to some users.

Twitter’s blue check mark was once a coveted status symbol. Now, some users are calling it “the dreaded mark” or that “stinking badge.”

Last week, Twitter began stripping the verification symbols from the profiles of thousands of celebrities, media personalities and politicians. The shift came as Elon Musk, the company’s chief executive, continued to roll out Twitter Blue, a subscription service that offers special features like tweet-editing in addition to the blue badge — for $8 a month.

Now that anyone can purchase a blue check, many users find the symbol newly uncool. The icon makes its owner appear “desperate for validation,” according to the rapper Doja Cat. To others, it signals support for Mr. Musk amid his bumpy takeover of the platform. Users who value the symbol enough to pay for it are being shouted over by a chorus of prominent users who say verification is no longer worth it.

Can the blue check remain desirable now that it has lost its air of exclusivity?

“The idea that you would pay for status, and that it’s something that’s not conferred upon you, seems to be fundamentally undesirable for people who have status,” said Robyn Caplan, a senior researcher at the Data & Society Research Institute.

Jacob Sartorius, 20, a musician and content creator, said he was elated to get a blue check in 2016. “It was an honor. It was kind of a symbol of, wow, something’s happening,” he said.

Mr. Sartorius said he would now rather spend $8 on a sandwich from Subway than on Twitter Blue. “It’s not something that’s cool anymore,” he said.

Twitter users’ self-consciousness when it comes to their blue checks speaks to the symbol’s evolution from a tool designed to prevent impersonation into a fickle marker of cultural relevance. Twitter introduced verification badges in 2009 during what Dr. Caplan called the “red carpet era” of social media, when companies were trying to coax celebrities and brands onto their platforms. The badges reassured public figures that they would not be impersonated, and the recognition served as an ego boost.

Because so many public figures received badges, and the faceless masses did not, jockeying for verification became something of a blood sport — and the blue check a symbol of victory. Guides proliferated online advising users on how to gain entry to the club.

Mr. Musk sought to undermine that two-tiered approach, which he called a “lords & peasants system.” He has framed Twitter Blue as a move to democratize the platform.

Waves of blue-check paranoia began to sweep across the platform last year, when Mr. Musk said he would soon start removing check marks from users’ profiles. After allowing the expected judgment day to come and go at the start of this month, Mr. Musk began removing the badges on April 20. (Mr. Musk has long shown an affinity for the number 420, which is often used to allude to marijuana, once dropping it into a tweet that landed him in hot water with the Securities and Exchange Commission.)

Mr. Musk did not respond to a request for comment, and an email to Twitter’s communications department was automatically replied to with a poop emoji...

Now that Musk let the rabble in, Twitter's no longer an insider's club of elite bad actors who have no interest in preserving the regular, majoritarian values of the this country. 

 

Twitter's Transgender Ideology Problem

From Amuse, "Twitter's Transgender Day of Rage":

Twitter suspended more than 5,000 conservative accounts for sharing evidence of far-left incitement from The Trans Radical Activist Network (its account wasn't suspended).

Not since the conservative purges related to January 6th and Covid-19 have so many Twitter accounts been locked and suspended in such a short period of time. Twitter’s head of trust and safety said she suspended more than 5,000 accounts for sharing evidence of an event titled “The Trans Day of Vengence” scheduled on Saturday by a group called The Trans Radical Activist Network in Washington DC. Many of us who didn’t share the details of the event got caught up in Twitter’s pro-trans dragnet. In my case, my account was locked for tweeting this:

The left’s constant narrative to children and individuals who struggle with identity is that anyone who opposes surgical intervention for children is “literally trying to kill” them making violence like we saw yesterday in Nashville ‘justified’ in the eyes of many Democrats.

~ @amuse

Eventually, I was allowed to delete the offending tweet and my account was restored. Out of an abundance of caution, I deleted every tweet and retweet related to the transgender movement I had made since the Nashville shooting—clear evidence of the chilling effect of Twitter’s continued censorship regime. I wasn’t alone. Federalist CEO Sean Davis was locked out of his Twitter account after reporting on the “Trans Day Of Vengeance”. Davis wrote,

“The cold-blooded mass murder at a Christian school in Nashville by an apparent transgender person came just days before a planned ‘Trans Day Of Vengeance’ organized by the Trans Radical Activist Network.” ~ @seanmdav

Davis chose not to manually delete the tweet as I did. Twitter already removed the tweet but requires in some sort of “Orwellian re-education exercise” that users ALSO delete the tweet—Davis has refused.

Twitter also locked Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene's congressional account @RepMTG after she criticized The Trans Radical Activist Network’s plan to hold their "Trans Day of Vengeance" despite the Nashville school shooting by a transgender activist.1 Ironically, the group’s own Twitter account @Trans_Radical was not suspended despite using it to promote their planned vengeance event in Washington DC on Saturday.2

Independent journalist Andy Ngô’s @MrAndyNgo account was locked after he pointed out that The Trans Radical Activist Network had locked its own account after it was caught promoting its vengeance event outside the Supreme Court...

Keep reading.

 

'Every Parent's Nightmare': TikTok Is a Venue for Child Sexual Exploitation

At the Wall Street Journal, "Law-enforcement officials say platform has emerged as biggest danger zone; adults who watch videos of young people are served up more of them." 

Ben Smith, Traffic

At Amazon, Ben Smith, Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral.

He Just Doesn't Want to Murder You

From Suzy Weiss, at the Free Press, "Scores of Facebook groups called ‘Are We Dating The Same Guy’ promise sisterhood and security. But they’re a lot more like a crowd-sourced Stasi":

The screenshot, taken from dating app Hinge, shows software engineer Evan,* with thick black hair and a big, toothy smile. His profile says he is 5 feet 8 inches and graduating from Berkeley. Underneath reads a caption:

“Evan, 26 🚩🚩🚩”

The way the screenshot is positioned, it looks like Evan is gazing at the red flags next to his name.

Evan’s profile had been posted anonymously on the Facebook group “Are We Dating The Same Guy? | New York City NYC”—which started in March 2022 as a place where women compare notes on men. It currently has more than 82,000 members.

In the past year, scores of similar Facebook groups have sprung up across the U.S. in cities including Charlotte, Philadelphia, Tampa, St. Louis, Boston, Chicago, Seattle, and Austin, and in far-flung locales such as Kosovo, Melbourne, and Thailand. Some have more than 30,000 members, others less than a hundred. Almost anybody can join as long as you agree to a few rules. One requirement is usually a variation of this: Do you swear that you will not screenshot or share anything found in this group with anyone outside of this group? This is vitally important to the integrity of our group and safety of our members.

There are rules against “bullying, gaslighting, shaming, victim blaming, or aggressive behavior,” too. But regardless of the Fight Club–style bylaws, the groups are pretty much a free-for-all.

The anonymous woman who posted about Evan regaled her group with stories about their four-month relationship before he dumped her.

“He struggles with empathy,” she wrote. “He also never tells you what he needs and expects you to guess what he needs.”

“He sounds like a classic love bomber to me,” opined one commenter, whose profile photo shows her posing on an Adirondack chair with a corgi.

“Borderline personality disorder,” another commenter snarked.

“This push and pull is part of the hunt if he is a covert narcissist,” said a third. “They are skilled predators and usually have had this same relationship over and over again.”

Another: “Textbook narc.”

Dozens of similar comments followed, speculating about Evan and his various pathologies...

 

Note From San Francisco

From Matt Taibbi, "On the way home after the holidays, notes on "cherry-picking" and a few other odds and ends":

Having seen the redwoods with the boys by day, sampled dim sum last evening, and overdosed nights on San Francisco movies (Bullitt, Vertigo, the underrated Zodiac), I’m headed home tonight. A terrific trip, which I won’t forget.

In the coming days you’ll find a new thread on Twitter, along with a two-part article here at TK explaining the latest #TwitterFiles findings. Even as someone in the middle of it, naturally jazzed by everything I’m reading, I feel the necessity of explaining why it’s important to keep hammering at this.

Any lawyer who’s ever sifted though a large discovery file will report the task is like archaeology. You dig a little, find a bit of a claw, dust some more and find a tooth, then hours later it’s the outline of a pelvis bone, and so on. After a while you think you’re looking at something that was alive once, but what?

Who knows? At the moment, all we can do is show a few pieces of what we think might be a larger story. I believe the broader picture will eventually describe a company that was directly or indirectly blamed for allowing Donald Trump to get elected, and whose subjugation and takeover by a furious combination of politicians, enforcement officials, and media then became a priority as soon as Trump took office.

These next few pieces are the result of looking at two discrete data sets, one ranging from mid-2017 to early 2018, and the other spanning from roughly March 2020 through the present. In the first piece focused on that late 2017 period, you see how Washington politicians learned that Twitter could be trained quickly to cooperate and cede control over its moderation process through a combination of threatened legislation and bad press.

In the second, you see how the cycle of threats and bad media that first emerged in 2017 became institutionalized, to the point where a long list of government enforcement agencies essentially got to operate Twitter as an involuntary contractor, heading into the 2020 election. Requests for moderation were funneled mainly through the FBI, the self-described “belly button” of the federal government (not a joke, an agent really calls it that).

The company leadership knew as far back as 2017 that giving in to even one request to suspend this or that set of accused “hostile foreign accounts” would lead to an endless cycle of such demands. “Will work to contain that,” offered one comms official, without much enthusiasm, after the company caved for the first time that year. By 2020, Twitter was living the hell its leaders created for themselves.

What does it all mean? I haven’t really had time to think it over. Surely, though, it means something. I’ve been amused by the accusation that these stories are “cherry-picked.” As opposed to what, the perfectly representative sample of the human experience you normally read in news? Former baseball analytics whiz Nate Silver chimed in on this front:

People don't distinguish enough between:

1) A ~random cross-section of communications from person/organization X
2) A cherry-picked set of favorable examples from a ~comprehensive set of communications from X

The threshold to move your priors should be **MUCH** higher under 2.

— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) December 26, 2022

Still more at that top link.

In Response to the Twitter Files, Establishment Media Rushes to Defend the FBI

It's Leighton Woodhouse, on Substack, "The Hunter Biden laptop story shows the extent to which the corporate media has become the propaganda arm of the state."

Twitter Files 8: Twitter's Joint Propaganda Efforts With CENTCOM and the Pentagon

At AoSHQ, "The new disclosures detail Twitter's active participation in CENTCOM/Pentagon propaganda efforts against Iran, China, Russia, and other miscreants."

Also, "The FBI Paid Twitter Three and a Half Million Dollars to 'Help' It Censor 'Misinformation'." 

And from yesterday, "Twitter Files Part 7: The Guns Begin to Smoke."

See also, Michael Shellenberger, from yesterday:

We expect the FBI, our highest law enforcement organization, to be above politics. The Twitter Files show that it isn't.

We need a serious congressional investigation and perhaps a special counsel to get to the bottom of its apparent corruption. https://t.co/AtU08zfsYS

— Michael Shellenberger (@ShellenbergerMD) December 20, 2022

The Obligatory Taylor Lorenz Suspended From Twitter Post

Lorenz is headlining on Memeorandum. 

She long ago blocked me, but it's not hard to find out what evils she's up to on the platform. 

Elon's suspended her. Haven't heard yet if it's a permanent ban, but if anyone deserves it, it's Lorenz. 

Too bad, though, because apparently she's been reinstated. 

At Fox News, "Taylor Lorenz suspended from Twitter, claims Elon Musk personally removed her from platform: Elon Musk recently suspended several journalists before restoring their accounts."

Her message to followers before the reinstatement, full of self-aggrandizement and unearned self-importance. Gawd:

Presstitutes https://t.co/mtFqUEuUX6

— 🍁 Bean 🍁 (@BeanFromPA) December 18, 2022

Andrew Marantz, Online Extremists, Techno-Utopians, and the Hijacking of the American Conversation

At Amazon, Andrew Marantz, Antisocial: Online Extremists, Techno-Utopians, and the Hijacking of the American Conversation.

The Lonely American (VIDEO)

An outstanding segment, from Laura Ingraham:

Joan Donavan, et al., Meme Wars

At Amazon, Joan Donavan, Meme Wars: The Untold Story of the Online Battles Upending Democracy in America.

Twitter Turmoil Poses Risks to the Company’s Brand

At the Wall Street Journal, "The social-media company is under a spotlight in the early days of Elon Musk’s ownership":

Twitter Inc.’s reputation among consumers and advertisers is at risk from the tumult unfolding under new owner Elon Musk, some branding executives and other observers say, even as some Twitter users think the change in leadership could improve the platform.

Mr. Musk, who closed his acquisition of the social-media company on Oct. 27, fired Twitter’s top executives, laid off about half its staff and floated several ideas for changes to the way the platform works. Some advertisers have paused their advertising on Twitter, largely either out of concern that Mr. Musk might weaken content moderation, potentially leading to more hate speech on the platform, or because of the uncertainty surrounding the company’s direction.

“This uncertainty and instability, entirely of Musk’s making, will quickly damage Twitter’s brand and unsettle users,” said Darren Savage, chief strategy officer of Omnicom Group Inc. -owned digital marketing agency Tribal Worldwide London.

But the new era at Twitter could also be an opportunity for the company to redefine its brand for the better.

Sixty-four percent of Twitter users said Mr. Musk will have a positive impact on the product, according to a survey of 1,212 adults who use the platform by polling firm Harris Insights & Analytics between Oct. 28 and 30.

The platform also has gotten an incredible amount of publicity since Mr. Musk’s takeover, said Tim Calkins, marketing professor at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. “And in many ways, that’s great news for Twitter, because now people are thinking about Twitter for the first time in a very long time,” he said.

But it remains unclear what Twitter under Mr. Musk will actually be, Mr. Calkins said.

Twitter didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Mr. Musk has indicated that he wants Twitter to be less restrictive about what users can share, and in his first weekend as owner posted a link to a conspiracy theory about the assault on the husband of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. He later deleted the tweet, and more broadly has said he would form a special council to tackle questions of content moderation.

Twitter will likely have to prove it can keep advertisers “safe” from appearing near content they might find concerning, while assuring those advertisers that they aren’t helping to fund a platform that allows racist or hateful content to flourish, ad executives said.

“Advertisers are thinking about how their dollars spent on the platform could be perceived as their direct support of Elon’s personal views,” said Toni Box, senior vice president of social media at media agency Assembly, part of ad holding company Stagwell Inc. “And Musk’s own personal tweets are being questioned in regard to brand safety and adjacency, so this could be very damaging if it’s not addressed quickly.”

Howard Belk, co-CEO of Omnicom Group brand consultancy Siegel + Gale, said the events at Twitter are likely changing the way people view it. “Recent turmoil at the company has had the effect of objectifying Twitter, raising the question with users and advertisers of whether Twitter is a safe media channel to desired consumers, or merely a plaything for Musk and a misinformation tool for bad actors domestically and around the world,” he said.

Twitter will now need to work to communicate with users in an attempt to mollify them, or risk potentially losing them, Mr. Belk added.

Twitter before Mr. Musk weathered a number of controversies that rattled some advertisers and users.

The number of Twitter’s monetizable average daily active users increased to 237.8 million in the second quarter this year from 229 million in the first quarter and 206 million a year earlier.

The company’s marketing team over the years developed advertising campaigns that positioned Twitter as a place for people who wanted to quickly know what was happening in the world and bring their most authentic selves to the internet. Ads aimed to boost the platform’s active user base by mimicking or reproducing the often-irreverent copywriting displayed by users on the platform. It ran a commercial during the Oscars in 2018.

But news coverage and Mr. Musk’s tweets could continue playing a big role in perceptions of Twitter because the company’s ad spending is relatively modest, and recently declining.

The company spent $1.4 million to advertise itself in the U.S. from January through August of this year, down from $2.2 million in the equivalent period a year earlier, according to estimates by research firm Kantar Media. Those figures include media such as TV, radio, outdoor ads, magazines and the internet, but exclude social media.

By comparison, advertising to promote the hot social-media platform TikTok in the U.S. from January through August totaled $51.6 million, up from $32.7 million in the same months of 2021.

“The brand drives strong engagement and relevance with their core users and has achieved significant presence in culture,” said Andrew Miller, an executive strategy director at Interbrand, a brand consultancy owned by Omnicom that annually ranks companies’ brand values.

But this is a potential inflection point for Twitter, Mr. Miller said. “When brands go through business change, either being acquired, merging, or going private in this case, one of the most important near-term objectives is to assuage the concerns of the user and customer base to minimize attrition through the transition.”

Twitter’s brand would benefit if its new owner took a step back from micromanaging day-to-day operations and avoided unhelpful tweets, including a new one Friday about a “massive drop in revenue” from advertiser cutbacks, said Aaron Kwittken, founder and chairman of Stagwell public-relations firm KWT Global...

 

Democrats Mad They Might Lose Power to Censor (VIDEO)

It's Saagar Enjeti:

Where Online Hate Speech Can Bring the Police to Your Door

It's Germany, which obviously has good justification for suppressing online right-wing extremism.

At the New York Times, "Battling far-right extremism, Germany has gone further than any other Western democracy to prosecute individuals for what they say online, testing the limits of free speech on the internet":

When the police pounded the door before dawn at a home in northwest Germany, a bleary-eyed young man in his boxer shorts answered. The officers asked for his father, who was at work.

They told him that his 51-year-old father was accused of violating laws against online hate speech, insults and misinformation. He had shared an image on Facebook with an inflammatory statement about immigration falsely attributed to a German politician. “Just because someone rapes, robs or is a serious criminal is not a reason for deportation,” the fake remark said.

The police then scoured the home for about 30 minutes, seizing a laptop and tablet as evidence, prosecutors said.

At that exact moment in March, a similar scene was playing out at about 100 other homes across Germany, part of a coordinated nationwide crackdown that continues to this day. After sharing images circulating on Facebook that carried a fake statement, the perpetrators had devices confiscated and some were fined.

“We are making it clear that anyone who posts hate messages must expect the police to be at the front door afterward,” Holger Münch, the head of the Federal Criminal Police Office, said after the March raids.

Hate speech, extremism, misogyny and misinformation are well-known byproducts of the internet. But the people behind the most toxic online behavior typically avoid any personal major real-world consequences. Most Western democracies like the United States have avoided policing the internet because of free speech rights, leaving a sea of slurs, targeted harassment and tweets telling public figures they’d be better off dead. At most, Facebook, YouTube or Twitter remove a post or suspend their account.

But over the past several years, Germany has forged another path, criminally prosecuting people for online hate speech.

German authorities have brought charges for insults, threats and harassment. The police have raided homes, confiscated electronics and brought people in for questioning. Judges have enforced fines worth thousands of dollars each and, in some cases, sent offenders to jail. The threat of prosecution, they believe, will not eradicate hate online, but push some of the worst behavior back into the shadows.

In doing so, they have flipped inside out what, to American ears, it means to protect free speech. The authorities in Germany argue that they are encouraging and defending free speech by providing a space where people can share opinions without fear of being attacked or abused.

“There has to be a line you cannot cross,” said Svenja Meininghaus, a state prosecutor who attended the raid of the father’s house. “There has to be consequences.”

But even in Germany, a country where the stain of Nazism drives a belief that free speech is not absolute, the crackdown is generating fierce debate:

How far is too far?

A Turning Point

Walter Lübcke was a well-liked if unassuming local politician in the central German state of Hesse. He was known among constituents more for his advocacy of wind turbines and a bigger airport than provocation. But as a supporter of then-Chancellor Angela Merkel’s immigration policies, he became a regular target of online abuse after a 2015 video of him had circulated in far-right circles. In the video, he suggested to a local audience that anyone who did not support taking in refugees could leave Germany themselves.

In June 2019, he was shot and killed by a neo-Nazi on the terrace of his house at close range, shocking the public to the depths of far-right extremism in the country and how online hate could lead to grave real-world violence.

Publicly displaying swastikas and other Nazi symbolism is illegal in Germany, as is denying or diminishing the significance of the Holocaust. Remarks considered to be inciting hatred are punishable with jail time. It is a crime to insult somebody in public.

But authorities struggled to translate the speech laws to the internet age, where the volume of toxicity is seemingly endless and often masked by anonymity.

At first, policymakers in Germany attempted to put more pressure on internet companies like Facebook to crack down. In 2017, the country passed a landmark law, the Network Enforcement Act, that forced Facebook and others to take down hate speech in as little as 24 hours of being notified or face fines.

Companies beefed up their content moderation efforts to comply, but many German policymakers said the law did not go far enough because it targeted companies rather than the individuals who were posting vile content. Hate speech and online abuse continued to spread after the law passed, as did the rise in far-right extremism.

The assassination of Mr. Lübcke represented a turning point, intensifying efforts to prosecute people who broke the speech laws online. And in the last year, the government adopted rules that made it easier to arrest those who target public figures online.

Daniel Holznagel, a former Justice Ministry official who helped draft the internet enforcement laws passed in 2017, compared the crackdown to going after copyright violators. He said people stopped illegally downloading music and movies as much after authorities began issuing fines and legal warnings.

“You can’t prosecute everyone, but it will have a big effect if you show that prosecution is possible,” said Mr. Holznagel, who is now a judge...

 

Max Fisher, The Chaos Machine

See, Max Fisher, The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World. 

Twitter Says It's Going to Sue Elon Musk for Trying to Back Out of Takeover Deal

Folks see Musk as a free-speech savior, so it'd be a bummer if the deal doesn't go through. That said, frankly, Twitter's valuation was below $44 billion when Musk first made the bid. It's dropped precipitously since then, not to mention the market value of Musk's Tesla electric car company, whose stock was being used to leverage the deal. 

We'll see, in any case. It's still awful bad on that hellsite. 

At the Verger, "Twitter says it’s going to sue Elon Musk for trying to back out of the deal."